Passions

One of my passions has grown to be commercial development. I work on it from a consultants side but would soon like to get into the game from a developer’s side. As I sit here thinking about the winding road that lead me here, I can’t help thinking about how a true passion comes about. Are we just born with this innate love for a career path or is it something that is developed over our years in a career? Is that why some people don’t love what their doing? Is it because they never became a firefighter or an astronaut like the said they wanted to be as a child?

In Steve Jobs famous commencement speech to students at Stanford University in 2005, he stated: “You’ve got to find what you love,” Jobs said. “The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it.” He states that the only way to do what you love is to find it. Is that how it really works? Do you have to search for your passion or meanings or is it something that you run into like a brick wall?

I can see both sides of this coin. Growing up, I never quite knew what I wanted to be. Hell, I didn’t even know what I was truly passionate about. In school, it was truly hard for me to say definitively that I was really passionate about anything (other than myself I guess). I would spin this to say that you can become passionate about your mission in life, not necessarily a career. But once you understand how you can align your career with your mission, then you will truly thrive. Once I made the mental shift to change my career into more than just a paycheck and into a vessel that would align with my personal mission, I really began to love what I was doing. It seemed to have purpose. From purpose came passion.